October 23, 2013
01:00 PM (EDT)

News Release Number: STScI-2013-39

Galaxy Found in Hubble Survey Has Farthest Confirmed Distance

October 23, 2013: A team of astronomers has discovered a galaxy that sets the current distance record for
galaxies whose distance has been definitively measured by spectroscopic redshift. The galaxy is seen as it was at a time just 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only about 5 percent of its current age of 13.8 billion years. This galaxy
and dozens of others were selected for follow-up observations from the approximately
100,000 galaxies discovered in the Hubble Space Telescope CANDELS survey (Cosmic Assembly
Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey). The team used the Keck I Telescope in
Hawaii to measure the redshift of the CANDELS galaxy, designated z8_GND_5296, at 7.51.
This is the highest galaxy redshift ever confirmed. The spectral redshift of galaxies is
caused by the expansion of space from the Big Bang.